8.6. Advantages and Disadvantages

At the risk of repeating myself, and everyone else who has ever uttered a word about Ajax, the advantage of Ajax is that a web application has the look and feel of a Windows or Linux application. No more does the visitor have to click and wait for the entire unload/reload cycle to complete. Instead, only the parts of the page that actually change are updated, which significantly cuts down on the time required for a page update.

On the other hand, Ajax requires additional work on the often-ignored client side; also, this technique is extremely browser dependent. Some people will be left out, including developers who fail to recognize that we are like deep-water sharks; we either continuously move forward or we begin to die. Some users will also be left behind, such as those who have not upgraded since they purchased their computer in 1995 and those who are so paranoid that they've disabled JavaScript. But from some points of view, that could be an advantage: The first group won't buy anything, and the second group is interested in only aluminum-foil hats.